What is Packets Filtering

This chapter presents the design and the implementation of a decentralized firewall. The latter uses autonomous agents to coordinately control the traffic on the network. The proposed framework includes a set of controllers’ agents that ensure the packets filtering services, a proxy agent that plays a role of a proxy server and an identifier agent which is responsible for user authentication. The decentralization of the different agents’ activities is managed by an administrator agent which is a core point for launching the most important operations of the access control. A prototype has been designed and implemented. Furthermore, the authors hope that the underlying framework will inform researchers of a possible way to implement a decentralized firewall to improve the current solution, and will help readers understand the need for techniques and tools such as firewalls that are useful to protect their network traffic.